A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion for misleading users about privacy, setting a record penalty. Meta plans to appeal. This week a New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay the state $25 billion. The order follows a jury finding that the company deceived Facebook users about their privacy, and it’s the biggest fine ever imposed on Meta. State District Court Judge Francis J. Mathew wrote that Facebook’s deception was intentional and that executives consistently misled users about how the platform worked. “Facebook promised users that they (the users) controlled their data. This was false,” he said, as reported by the Associated Press. This is a case about promises, not about a breach. Jurors found in September that Meta committed over 43 million violations of New Mexico consumer protection laws by making misleading public statements about how it handled users’ personal data. The case grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a political consulting firm harvested Facebook data to build targeted political ads for the 2016 election. New Mexico had asked the court to fine Meta between $35 billion and $40 billion, arguing that only a large penalty would push the company to change its behavior. Meta’s lawyers said the fine should not exceed $3.4 billion and argued that any higher amount would be unconstitutional. The jury found more than 43 million violations, including 2.1 million under specific claims. Each violation can carry a fine of up to $5,000. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said the ruling sends a clear warning to technology companies that they must follow the law. Under the state’s constitution, fines for consumer protection violations go toward education. However, the money may remain tied up while Meta appeals the decision. Meta plans to appeal the $25 billion ruling. The company argues that the decision and the way New Mexico is enforcing consumer protection laws make it almost impossible to operate in the state. Meta’s chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney, says the case is an attempt to restrict free speech and impose new rules on what people can say online. The company says it is confident it will win the appeal. Meta’s lawyers also argued that the state failed to prove that residents had actually seen the misleading statements or suffered harm as a result. Meta is worth $1.8 trillion and brought in more than $200 billion in revenue last year, and its shares rose 2% after the announcement, with earnings due that day. A nonprofit director called $25 billion a drop in the bucket for Meta, though he said it shows people want accountability. Both can be true: the company says doing business in New Mexico is all but impossible, and Wall Street shrugged. The history explains why the number is so large. Cambridge Analytica got data through a personality quiz app that around 300,000 people took, and the app also pulled data on their friends, building a dataset of 87 million profiles. Meta banned the app in 2015 and asked Cambridge Analytica to delete the data, and the firm shut down in May 2018. The company later agreed to pay $725 million in December 2022 to settle a class action over sharing with Cambridge Analytica, and the FTC fined it $5 billion in 2019, a fifth of today’s award. New Mexico was not part of the $18 billion settlement Meta reached in August with almost all other US states and territories. The deal includes stronger child-safety measures and $459 million related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This is Meta’s second legal defeat in New Mexico in six months. In March, a jury ordered the company to pay $375 million for misleading users about children’s safety. Meta’s appeal could reduce the $25 billion fine if a court lowers the number of violations. The case also sends a warning to companies: privacy promises have legal consequences. As the judge stated, Facebook told users they controlled their data, but this was not true. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Cambridge Analytica Scandal)
Cloud hosting provider Railway published an urgent warning to users after detecting suspicious activity on its systems that store customer environment variables earlier this week. The company says its investigation indicates that, in some cases, an unauthorized third party may have obtained decrypted variables and urges all users to proactively rotate secrets and credentials. “Our investigation to date indicates that an unauthorized third party may have accessed encrypted environment variables and, for some of them, obtained the decrypted contents,” Railway says. “Environment variables may contain secrets such as API keys or database and registry credentials,” the company clarifies. Railway is a cloud platform for developers to deploy and run applications, APIs, databases, and various backend services. It has around 4.8 million users and hosts more than 16 million services.
Hackers compromised the LiteLLM project’s PyPI package and published malicious Docker images with a payload that steals credentials, secrets, and environment variables. The supply-chain attack affected all PyPI wheels (.whl installation packages) for LiteLLM version 1.107.0, impacting Windows, Linux, and macOS systems. LiteLLM is an open-source Python SDK and AI gateway that enables applications to access AI models from different providers through a common API. It is a massively popular project with 61,800 GitHub stars, 92 million monthly downloads on PyPI, and is used by high-profile companies like NVIDIA, Netflix, AT&T, and Okta. The project says that the release pipeline was compromised on October 21 and a threat actor pushed version 1.107.0 to the Docker registry and PyPI. "This version contained compiled malware which steals credentials and loads remote-code execution tools," the maintainer says, adding that customers running the private enterprise were not impacted.
Right now, there is probably an AI agent running on a laptop somewhere in your network. It stores API keys and database passwords, can access your internal systems, and works without anyone watching. Nobody reviewed its access. Nobody owns it. If an employee had that much reach with that little oversight, you would call it an insider risk. So why do we still call the agent a productivity tool?
Attackers are exploiting a zero-day SQL injection flaw in Arista's VeloCloud Orchestrator (VCO), the central management system for VeloCloud SD-WAN networks, the company said in an advisory on October 22. The flaw lets anyone who can log in to the orchestrator, even with a read-only customer account, gain operator privileges, the top level of control over it. For
eMudhra, an Indian certificate authority (CA), will withdraw from its global SSL/TLS certificate business, its board decided on Thursday. The decision came five days after a researcher reported recovering the private keys of eight of its intermediate CA certificates. eMudhra said it will replace affected customers' certificates with free ones from partners, though its
This week has already been rough for cybersecurity. Critical PHP and GitLab RCE flaws, serious Linux security bugs, compromised eMudhra certificates, a Node.js RCE flaw, a hacked LiteLLM release, and hundreds of hijacked Tor relays. That's a lot to deal with in just a few days. And the week isn't even over yet. But those big headlines are only half the story. Stolen passwords, exposed
Arista Networks released security updates to patch an actively exploited zero-day vulnerability affecting VeloCloud Orchestrator (VCO) On-Prem deployments. VCO is a web-based management portal that helps administrators configure, monitor, and manage VeloCloud SD-WANs (Software-Defined Wide Area Networks) and associated edge devices. Tracked as CVE-2026-114625, this critical-severity flaw can allow attackers with basic privileges, access to the VCO web interface, and a valid authenticated session to escalate privileges through low-complexity SQL injection attacks that don't require user interaction. "VeloCloud Orchestrator (VCO) on-prem has a security issue where this issue may allow a remote attacker to access privileged internal functionality and impact the VCO host. Successful exploitation may compromise the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the orchestrator and data managed by the orchestrator," Arista said.
Eight compromised eMudhra intermediate CA private keys risk unauthorized TLS signing and MitM interception. Read our analysis and containment guide. The post EMudhra Intermediate CA Certificates Compromised appeared first on Unit 42.
Linux servers running KSMBD, the kernel's built-in SMB server, are exposed to two publicly reported remote code execution flaws rated 9.0 by Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative, with no fix yet in the mainline kernel. One of them, ZDI-CAN-33774, can be triggered before any network authentication. The other, ZDI-CAN-33549, requires the SMB Direct transport and an RDMA-capable network
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